A common refrain you’ll hear during a tennis match is “quiet, please.” It’s what starts a set and stops most yapping. The rule, even when unspoken, is what governs spectators. It liberates the players too: that absence of sound can open the door to a cosmic kind of athleticism, where a stream of rapid-fire micro-decisions leads to the most gravity-defying plays.
I’m told that most tennis players don’t expect much disruption this time of year – that they expect Canadians to be reserved and quiet during matches. Maybe our reputation precedes us because it suffers from comparison to the US or the UK. Maybe it’s because in tennis, we’re not used to winning as much. Whatever the assumptions or reasons, I still find this to be untrue, especially when a Canadian tennis player is out on the court. From what I’ve seen, that’s all it takes for the national pride and heckling to come out. The crowds are anything but quiet. And tonight I’m proven right by thousands of shrieking fans in Toronto Sobey’s Stadium. It’s the men’s final, and Karen Khachanov is trying to serve. His opponent, Ben Shelton, keeps asking what’s going on. Whether it’s because he’s tired of repeating himself or getting drowned out, he’ll walk up to the chair umpire — the one person who can tame this crowd with a quiet, please — for an answer. The umpire, who knows he can’t compete with the uproar, will simply explain the cause of it all. “I guess the Canadian player won in Montreal,” is what he says. And while I can’t make out Shelton’s response, what he does right after says enough. He nods and returns to the baseline to wait out the frenzy. He’s trying to win his first career title tonight too.
Five hours away in Montreal, the Canadian player in question, Victoria Mboko, has defeated Naomi Osaka. She’s now running through the stands so she can hug her coach and parents. Very few expected the 18-year-old to win tonight. At the start of the tournament, Mboko was a wild card draw, not a headliner. And in just a few days, she was the last Canadian standing in the entire tournament. All it took was a week, seven matches and defeating four Grand Slam champions to turn the tides. If the reaction from the crowds in both Toronto and Montreal still seems like overkill at this point, then here’s another way to frame it: Mboko’s victory didn’t just mark a turning point in her career, but for tennis in Canada.
Canada has had a longer history with tennis than most people know. The Canadian Open (now the National Bank Open) is the third oldest tennis tournament in the world after Wimbledon and the US Open. Since its inception, the tournament has been owned and operated by Tennis Canada, a non-profit national sporting association. Early competitors were mostly amateurs until 1968, when pros like Arthur Ashe and Bjorn Borg were invited to compete. In an effort to attract even more professional players and fans, organizers had to boost Canada’s profile as a tennis capital and that meant building a new facility – the National Tennis Centre. The open-air stadium could hold up to 10,000 fans and host matches on its new Har-Thru courts. The upgraded venue allowed Tennis Canada to market the tournament as a product that could attract world-class talent, turn a profit and ultimately position Canada as a world-leading tennis nation.
While the country became the ultimate host for international tennis stars and fans, its own athletes played in obscurity. The only standout was Daniel Nestor, who turned pro at 19 and made history – and a name for himself – as the first men’s player to win all 4 Grand Slam and ATP Masters 1000 titles and the Olympics. But Nestor, who’s often referred to as a “quiet champion,” achieved those successes with little material support and fanfare. Despite his success, his name wasn’t intertwined with the culture and zeitgeist like Agassi or Sampras. When I volunteered at the tournament over 20 years ago, Canadian players were never the main draw, both literally and figuratively. Many had to qualify, and weren’t featured in promotional materials; that marketing real estate was reserved for the likes of Roddick, Federer and Nadal. These names sold tickets while most Canadian players drew a blank. Only once did a guest ask me about a Canadian player’s match and when I couldn’t answer, a fan quickly intervened, asking why she cared so much. The Canadian tennis players were good, he explained to the guest, but they weren’t great. And so the tournament didn’t break down barriers for Canadian players, but it did for fans by putting them in close proximity to world-renowned talent.
Everything has changed now, including the venue. As I walk up to Sobey’s Stadium in late July, I can see posters of Milos Raonic, Gabriel Diallo, Denis Shapovalov and Félix Auger-Aliassime. These are all Canadian players who, with the exception of Raonic (he’s recovering from an injury), are main draws and top seeds this year. They have played Wimbledon. One of them (Shapovalov) has even defeated Nadal. While current number 1 in the world, Jannik Sinner, hadn’t won a match against Auger-Aliassime until last month. And others were featured in the Netflix tennis docu-series Break Point. Their matches are well-attended, their fans proudly heckle opponents and yes, people know who they are.
NBO Toronto’s Tournament Director, Karl Hale, confirms that the mindset of the tennis community in Canada has shifted. And that’s thanks to Michael Downey, who was hired on as President and CEO of Tennis Canada in 2004. Downey didn’t have a background in tennis, but he did have a strategy and that was to strengthen tennis development in Canada. “He came in and said ‘we’re going to be great and that’s the only option,’” explains Hale. And he meant it: Downey recruited legendary coaches Bob Brett and Louis Borfiga with the goal of replicating elite tennis programs in Montreal and Toronto. He challenged the players too, informing them that the organization would only support them if they met the international standard. “The initial reaction to that was obviously some pushback,” says Hale, but in two years, things started to change. Hale observed that as soon as “people stepped up to the new standard, you started to see Filip Peliow win a bunch of junior titles, Wimbledon, etc., and then Eugenie Bouchard came along, then Milos Raonic and Vasek Pospisil – they started to really do well on the tour.” But Downey didn’t stop there.
A tennis match may need two players to face off on a court, but they need so much more to get there. The sport, especially at an elite level, is not cheap and bills stack up quickly from coaches, physio, strength training and conditioning, equipment, tutors, sports psychologists, year-round access to a tennis court, flights and hotels. In order for players to step up and meet Downey’s higher expectations, they needed money. The solution was a full-time National Tennis Centre in Montreal that made tennis more accessible by providing elite training, coaching and resources to players. And while many players have improved – with Raonic ranking third in the world – the question now is if other players can match that and win a final. That progress has resulted in a renewed sense of pride, but in the last year-and-a-half, there’s been a bit of a lull. Most of the players were ranked 30 in the world, and while that is still better than the average ranking 20 years ago, people now expect Canadian players to win.
The last time a Canadian player won the men’s final at the National Bank Open was Robert Bédard in 1958. The pressure applied on the men’s players is twofold. Montreal’s Eugenie Bouchard won the women’s title in 2019. And now that Alcarez and Sinner withdrew from the NBO days before the tournament, everyone’s eager for a breakout star.
The Canadian players have been technically great: they have powerful serves, they can play close to the net and they can keep Taylor Fritz and Flavio Cobolli on their toes. None of the men’s players will make it past the second round this year. The photographer I’m working with calls this the “Canadian curse,” but I think it’s too early to tell. Most of the qualifying Canadian players turned pro in their teens and so they’re still young. And yet there’s a way they carry themselves on the court; they exude soft and quiet power over the court. They don’t act like underdogs. They play like contenders, like they belong on that court. Are they fully formed yet? No; we just have players worth cheering for.
On the second day of covering this tournament, I’ll watch as 18-year-old Nicolas Arseneault wins his first ATP match. In his first ever press conference, he’ll say it’s the best thing that’s ever happened to him yet. “I saw today where my level is at,” he explains to the reporters, “I just beat someone [in] the top 100, so I know…I’m only going to get better from here, and this is all just a learning experience.” He’s set to begin university in a few weeks, but before then, he’ll face defending champion Alexei Popyrin. A reporter asks him if everything has sunken in yet and he says no.
Tennis is a single-player sport. There are no teammates to buffer a poor performance or the aftereffects of a loss, but there is always a crowd. The NBO crowd has grown since Hale first joined the tournament. At one point, attendance was so low they had to move people down to fill the empty seats. The night before, during a quarter-final match between Shelton and Cobolli, the stands stayed full until 1 a.m. If one thing is clear now, it’s that everyone in that stadium, from the people in the nosebleeds to those who’ve paid good money, wants the same thing: a cause for celebration. They want to rise in the air and hang there for an instant, suspended by some magic playing out on the court.
Really good players can tune out the crowd and feed off of it. They’re hands are on an imaginary dial that they can turn on or off. What differs from us and them is how we interpret a win. While we sit there celebrating or taking credit for it, most players have already moved on. They’re preparing for the next serve, match or tournament. They don’t internalize success but pull it apart: what went right, wrong, and what could work better next time. They are constantly finding ways to improve. Hale not only sees this in Victoria Mboko already, but he’s convinced, just a few days before the final, that she’s going to win. “She expects to be really good,” he says, “her internal standards are higher than what people project on her, so I believe she’ll be around for a long time.”
The night Kale is proven right, a victorious Mboko is aired on every screen in Centre Court during the Shelton and Khachanov match. What precedes that thunderous applause is a replay of the match point. And just as everyone there realizes she’s won, just as the match is about to pause, and right before Shelton walks up to the umpire, Mboko will drop to her knees. It’s one thing to believe you’ll win, to train and self-edit your shots in the hopes of overcoming an opponent, but when it comes, that victory still catches every player off guard. And it’s the crowd that makes it feel real. That night, everyone in the stands will cheer on Shelton after he wins his first title too. The next day, he’ll congratulate Mboko and add that he had “no idea what was going on at the time 😂 but Toronto went nuts for you 🙏🏽.”
